Hello, and welcome to this week’s film roundup! Each week we run through the biggest new cinema releases and talk about why you should get excited for them. This week we shut the hell up with A Quiet Place: Day One, say some kind words about Yorgos Lanthimos’ latest Kinds of Kindness, and explore the horizons of Kevin Costner’s passion project Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 1.
Usual disclaimer: unless otherwise stated, I haven’t seen these films. All of my opinions are based on trailers, early reviews and other rumours and buzz.
A Quiet Place: Day One
The first Quiet Place film, set in a world overrun by alien creatures who hunt purely by sound and will pounce on even the slightest noise, was a wonderful cinematic experience. Not just because the film itself was great – which it absolutely was – but also because it had the quietest audience I’ve ever come across in a cinema. The slightest rustle of popcorn felt like a betrayal of the human race. The second film didn’t quite live up to the originality of the first, but was still very enjoyable. It was also great to see Hollywood’s Most Likeable Couple John Krasinski and Emily Blunt working together – Blunt as the star, and Krasinski as co-star, writer and director.
For this new film, Krasinski is stepping back to just a writer/producer role, replaced as director by Michael Sarnoski (best known for the Nic Cage drama Pig). Blunt is also absent, with Day One charting the beginning of the apocalypse from the perspective of a whole new set of characters (with the case including Lupita Nyong’o, Joseph Quinn, Alex Wolff and Djimon Hounsou). The opening of Part II showed how Blunt and Krasinski’s home fell to the monsters, which was exciting but on a much smaller scale than this prequel. Now the action is moved to New York, which appears to be the epicentre of the invasion – the trailer shows planes bombing Manhattan’s bridges to try and contain the creatures, which is clearly a fool-proof plan. It’s a great idea to set a film in which survival depends on silence in one of the busiest and noisiest cities in the world – the trailer plays with that idea from the off, with Nyong’o’s Sam strolling through a crescendo of traffic sounds and chatter moments before the world goes to pot. The inevitable 28 Days Later-style shots of a silent, empty New York by the end of the film are going to be particularly eerie.
With Maxxxine and Longlegs arriving in the coming weeks, this is the start of what promises to be a strong run of summer horror films, and is likely to be the most block-busting. Definitely one for the big screen, and hopefully the audience will remember to shut up again…
- A Quiet Place: Day One on IMDB
- A Quiet Place: Day One on Rotten Tomatoes
Kinds of Kindness
Yorgos Lanthimos has become one of the most consistently exciting directors working today. All of his films (including The Lobster, The Favourite and recent entry Poor Things) become instant favourites and cult classics, and increasingly are getting the awards recognition that they deserve. Kinds of Kindness reunites him with Emma Stone, who won an Oscar for her leading role in Poor Things, Willem Dafoe and Margaret Qualley, and adds Jesse Plemons (who feels like such an obvious fit with Lanthimos’s style that I was surprised this was their first collaboration), Hong Chau and Mamoudou Athie.
The film is arranged as a triptych, with all of the main cast taking multiple roles across the different stories. The trailer doesn’t give too much away about the plots, and the official synopsis is actually pretty vague too – “A man seeks to break free from his predetermined path, a cop questions his wife’s demeanour after her return from a supposed drowning, and a woman searches for an extraordinary individual prophesied to become a renowned spiritual guide.” It will be interesting to see how much connective tissue there is between the different threads, besides the shared actors.
Like all of Lanthimos’s films, I expect this to be a lot of fun in a straight-faced but utterly barmy kind of way. Which is perfectly encapsulated by the final shot of the trailer. I heartily recommend trying to see this in the cinema – it seems to be getting a lot less fanfare than Poor Things did so might not be out for long, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it pulls a Saltburn and becomes more of a hit when it lands on streaming services. See it now so you can act all smug when all your friends discover it in a few months’ time…
- Kinds of Kindness on IMDB
- Kinds of Kindness on Rotten Tomatoes
Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter One
Written, directed, starring, and largely funded by Kevin Costner, who reportedly put around $38 million of his own money into the project, Horizon is a classic western set during the American Civil War. Unsurprisingly given its subtitle, it is just so very American – the music in the trailer sounds a lot like Amazing Grace, the film’s logo has the US flag waving across the lettering, and every character acts like they are the hero of the story. That story is the settlement of the wild west, and it has everything you would expect to see in a western – cowboys and Native Americans, pistol fights, beautiful sweeping shots of the American country, and more horses and wagons than you can shake a Stetson at.
Alongside Costner, the cast includes Sienna Miller, Sam Worthington, Jena Malone, Giovanni Ribisi, Danny Huston and Michael Rooker. The film premiered at Cannes this year where it received a 10-minute standing ovation, which is clearly a good sign. Despite the three hour run-time, I would encourage people to see this – there are plenty of actors and directors who could afford to finance their own movies, and if that gives them more creative control then this could be the start of a new movement of original and exciting filmmaking (but only if it’s successful). And if you enjoy it, Part Two is only a couple of months away…
- Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter One on IMDB
- Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter One on Rotten Tomatoes
If you only see one film this week…
There are no bad choices this week – A Quiet Place and Horizon both look like they should be enjoyed on the big screen – but my film of the week has to be the surreal daftness of Kinds of Kindness.
Still in cinemas and worth a watch
- The Bikeriders
- Inside Out 2
- Bad Boys: Ride or Die
Trailer of the week
Nosferatu feels like an interesting choice to remake. The 1922 original was famously sued by Bram Stoker’s widow after director F. W. Murnau failed to get the rights to Dracula so just changed all the names and made it anyway. As part of the settlement, all original copies of the film were destroyed, but fortunately for cinematic history it survived through some second-generation reels. It is now revered as a masterpiece of German expressionist cinema and one of the most influential horror films of all time. Nowadays, Dracula is in the public domain and free to be adapted by anyone who wants to tell that story, so why would anyone choose instead to try to resurrect Count Orlok?
That choice makes a lot more sense when the person making it is Robert Eggers. The director behind such unsettling and surreal works as The Lighthouse, The Witch and The Northman (three separate films, not a weird Narnia adaptation) has just the right blend of artistic style and horror sensibilities to do justice to the classic. This looks creepy as anything, with disturbing imagery and sounds to put you on edge despite only having minimal sightings of the vampire himself. Orlok is played by Bill “the weird one” Skarsgård, while the Van Helsing-type role (Professor Albin Eberhart von Franz in this version) is played by Eggers regular Willem Dafoe. The cast also include Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Nicholas Hoult, Emma Corrin, Lily-Rose Depp and Ralph Ineson.
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